A3Cube: Unusual New Entrant in the Storage Wars

By Tiernan Ray

A3Cube’s state-side staff: from left, Stephen Ozoigbo, Antonella Rubicco, and Emilio Billi at the company’s headquarters in San Jose, June 2014.

There are numerous combatants in the increasing war between storage incumbents EMC (EMC) and NetApp (NTAP), and the upstart challengers. I chronicled a few of the more established names in a column in this week’s Barron’s print magazine, including Maxta, Skyera, Tegile Systems, and Nutanix.

I also had a chance to meet last week with a younger outfit, based in San Jose, called A3Cube. In a small suite of offices in an unassuming downtown office building there, the three employees who are stateside coordinate the strategy and business development of a company whose main work force, 18 other people, are in Italy refining the product engineering and testing and support.

The company, founded in 2012 with less than $1 million from the executives themselves, and from angel investors, has developed a so-called fabric for connecting CPUs in servers to both the local storage and to storage in other boxes, in a way that gets around the latency induced by typical network connections in a storage area network such as fibre channel and iSCSI.

The fabric is ideal for emerging types of big data applications, the company believes, such as Hadoop.

Sold as a plug-in card using PCIe, the product uses what’s called “remote direct memory access,” or RDMA, that makes every piece of storage look like it is on the same PCIe card connected to the CPU, even if it is in another part of the data center. The name for the fabric built into the card is “RONNIEE EXPRESS,” which came from the company mascot, Ronnie, a dog belonging to co-founder Antonella Rubicco.

At the edge of A3Cube’s PCIe card, near the connectors, is an image of a dog named Ronnie, the company mascot, for whom the company’s interconnect fabric, RONNIEE EXPRESS, was named.

The main designer, co-founder Emilio Billi, chief technology officer, worked on the problem for six years in Italy at the University of Turin before the company’s founding in 2012. Initially, the company was working on how to connect pools of DRAM memory across machines. Then, SSD flash-based drives became viable as an alternative.

As Billi explained the problem, the average latency of server-attached storage of about 5 micro-seconds explodes to 20 microseconds or more when storage is shipped across a fibre channel or other type of network connection, with multiple layers of overhead, an intolerable delay for latency-sensitive applications.

The company’s PCIe card uses a so-called look-up table that maps local memory addresses into remote memory addresses, so that each piece of data fetched has far less overhead in being brought across the network to the CPU that needs it.

The result, he says, is perhaps 7.5 microseconds latency to traverse the network, retrieve data, and bring it back. Storage that looks always as if it’s local in this way could be beneficial to systems running Hadoop, which have classically relied on local memory access.

The technology may sound familiar: it is similar to an approach pursued by startup DSSD, founded by Silicon Valley legend Andy Bechtolsheim and bought last month by EMC. That system is also designed to reduce latency by avoiding traditional storage networking interfaces such as fibre channel and iSCSI.

Billi concurs his efforts are similar to that of DSSD, but notes that DSSD is using a method called “DMA broadcast,” which is not as efficient, he believes, as his approach, because it doesn’t really preserve the attributes of local memory access.

In a twist, not only can data be moved across servers, but individual virtual machine instances can be moved from one server to another. “You can move the VM to where the storage is, rather than the other way around,” explains Billi. In addition, the SSDs inside each server can serve as a sort of main memory pool, for things such as swap disks and paging in and out of memory, going back to Billi’s early experiments in DRAM shared memory.

The approach has involved designing not only the card itself but also a special type of cabling and connector. The card is being manufactured by local EMS shop Rocket of Santa Clara, and the cabling by Airborn, also here in the States.

Billi showed me a console of the server machines back in Italy (A3Cube has been helped on the server side by Intel (INTC) providing lots of test systems), where a stream of command-line tests showed latency dropped dramatically as the switch was thrown to turn on the RDMA acccess.

The company is taking orders for the cards now and plans to ship in the next four to six weeks.

The other two founders bring an interesting blend of strengths to the young company. Rubicco studied physics in Italy, but also, in the classic European model of deep academic pursuit, economics and law.

Stephen Ozoigbo, chief strategy officer, brings extensive experience on Wall Street at Smith Barney-Citigroup and other firms. He is in charge of talking with suppliers and partners and customers, but he also clearly knows his way around the money types, having lived in that world. As I talked with him about investment comparables and the like, he displayed a knowing expression about how investors like to talk about startups beyond just the technology. Ozoigbo currently has a document laying out how the company could make use of funding to the tune of $15 million.

Assuming they can raise the requisite capital, the company is entering at a propitious time, with storage outfits much in the news. Only today, SanDisk (SNDK) acquired flash storage pioneerFusion-io (FIO) for $1.1 billion in cash, boosting the fortunes of other flash players such as Nimble Storage (NMBL) and Violin Memory (VMEM).

About Tech Trader Daily

Tech Trader Daily is a blog on technology investing written by Barron’s veteran Tiernan Ray. The blog provides news, analysis and original reporting on events important to investors in software, hardware, the Internet, telecommunications and related fields. Comments and tips can be sent to: techtraderdaily@barrons.com.